I will share new products that I find to help our families affected with Autism and news stories that I find interesting.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Autism Can Be An Asset In The Workplace, Employers And Workers Find

As the population of people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder
keeps growing, so does the number of people with that diagnosis who
aren't finding employment.

Though many young adults on the spectrum are considered high functioning,
recent research shows 40 percent don't find work — a higher jobless
rate than people with other developmental disabilities experience.

Research scientist Anne Roux, of the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia, studies young adults with autism and was the lead author of that study.

"When
we learned that last year — that about 40 percent of people were never
getting employment or continuing their education — we wondered, 'why is
that, and what happens to them?' "

Young people on the spectrum
— just like other young people — are eager to live independently and
work, she and her team found as they looked deeper. But social services
aimed at helping children overcome early deficits in communication and
problems with social skills become less available as those students get
older.

"Once you develop into an adult, those resources plummet," says Leslie Long, vice president of adult services for the advocacy group Autism Speaks.

An
estimated 50,000 people on the spectrum enter adulthood every year.
Face-to-face job interviews can be a challenge for many, Long says, and
some engage in repetitive behaviors, which can seem odd to the
uninitiated.

But those idiosyncracies sometimes mask hidden talents, she says — like intense focus, or a facility with numbers and patterns.

"I
mean, look at what happened with the housing bubble and the financial
market," she points out. "It was a man on the spectrum who saw which
mortgages were going to fall. And I don't think that's something an
average person would have been able to do."

That particular case — of Dr. Michael Burry, the physician and hedge fund manager featured in the book and movie The Big Short — is in many ways exceptional, Long admits. (Burry has a son with Asperger's syndrome, and has said he believes he fits the diagnosis, as well.)

Still,
with baby boomers starting to retire, and with talent in increasingly
short supply, companies as varied as Microsoft, Walgreens, Capital One,
AMC Theaters, and Proctor & Gamble are all starting to actively
recruit people who have autism spectrum disorder. They aren't yet
putting a lot more people to work, but their recruiting and training
programs are becoming models for other firms.